47 Human Rights Commission In a landmark 2014 report, the Waitangi Tribunal reaffirmed that rangatira did not grant sovereignty to the British. Having the Tribunal validate the understanding of their tīpuna rangatira was a triumph for tangata whenua. Rangatira did not cede their sovereignty in February 1840; that is, they did not cede their authority to make and enforce law over their people and within their territories. Rather, they agreed to share power and authority with the Governor. They and Hobson were to be equal, but with different roles and different spheres of influence… But the rangatira did not surrender to the British the sole right to make and enforce law over Māori. It was up to the British, as the party drafting and explaining the treaty, to make clear that this was their intention. Hobson’s silence on this crucial matter means that the Crown’s self-imposed condition of obtaining full and free Māori consent was not met (Waitangi Tribunal, 2014, pp. 526–7). Despite this, the Crown “hastily and peremptorily dismissed” the Tribunal’s findings (Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, 2018, p. 55), because conceding would have had constitutional implications for Aotearoa. Even after major Treaty settlements in the 1990s, the Crown in the 2000s, showed little sign of recognising any significant form of rangatiratanga (Hill, 2009, p. 9). Wars of sovereignty and unjust legislation Questions regarding the limited powers of kāwanatanga, granted to the Crown, and the rangatiratanga, retained by Māori, created tensions between the Crown and Māori. This led to wars perpetrated by the Crown on Māori. The first war began five years after the signing of Te Tiriti and continued for another 20 years with significant warfare over land, with rangatira and hapū resisting European expansion and settlement (Belich, 1988, p. 15): Nineteenth century Māori fought in defence of mana and land in the Wairau, Northland, the Hutt Valley, Whanganui, Taranaki, Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, the central North Island, the East Coast and Hawke’s Bay. Titokowaru Riwha and Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki led guerrilla campaigns across the central North Island. Māori won many battles but, like other minority indigenous populations, were unable to win the war against a colonial government able to apply larger numbers of settlers, overwhelming military resources, and divide-and-rule strategies to extinguish the flames of those it labelled as rebels. During the darkest days of these campaigns, colonial cavalry charged and sabred to death Māori youths foraging for geese at John Handley’s woolshed, near Pātea (Cowan, 1923, p. 260); bounties were paid for Māori heads in South Taranaki (Simpson, 1979, p. 189); four prisoners were summarily executed at Ngātapa (Belich, 1986, p. 266); surrendering Māori were shot at Rangiaowhia (Cowan, 1922, pp. 343-347); noncombatant men, women and children were starved and shot during the scorched-earth invasion of the Urewera Forest (Cowan, 1923, pp. 337-361); and Auckland Māori were expelled, or interned and forced to wear coloured armbands. Imprisonment, land confiscations, dubious land sales and wholesale European settlement of ancestral lands followed (R. Taonui, Māori Urban Protest Movements, in D. Keenan, Huia Histories, 2011, p. 230). Historically Pākehā have termed these conflicts ‘The Land Wars’ or in the case of Belich (1988) ‘The New Zealand Wars’. More correctly, they can be termed ‘The Wars of Sovereignty’ because this “more aptly recognises them as colonising wars to take power” (Jackson, 2016) or ‘The Pākehā Wars on Māori’ because that is exactly what they were (Taonui, 2021). The New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 and the Suppression of Rebellion Act 1863 The aftermath of the wars saw the application of unjust legislation to suppress Māori. Lands were confiscated through an Order in Council, under the New Zealand Settlements Act (1863), which